Standardize, geocode, and enrich patient addresses at scale.
And we'll sign your BAA.

Yes, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, addresses are considered PHI (Protected Health Information):

All geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, ZIP code, and their equivalent geocodes [are considered PHI], except for the initial three digits of the ZIP code [provided certain conditions are met]

HHS has specific rules for how to de-identify addresses. In no situation is the full address including the street address de-identified—a full address is always PHI.

If you need to standardize or geocode patient addresses, you need to use a HIPAA-compliant geocoder with a signed BAA. Examples of HIPAA-compliant geocoders include Geocodio.

Yes—only if you use a HIPAA-compliant geocoder, or self-host a geocoder in a HIPAA-compliant environment.

According to health researchers, "clinical epidemiology and patient-oriented health care research that incorporates neighborhood-level data is becoming increasingly common."

Geocodio's Enterprise product is one such HIPAA/HITECH-compliant geocoding service.

Yes! Onboarding a new vendor can take time when compliance is involved. So there shouldn't be any surprises about the data you'll get back or how the product works. You should be able to know exactly what you're buying and that it'll work for your needs—before you get Legal and IT Security involved.

Create a free demo account today to try our Enterprise service. You'll get 100 free lookup credits that you can use to try all of our APIs, data appends, and spreadsheet geocoding.

Note: When you're ready to upgrade, we'll sign a BAA. We can't sign BAAs on our Demo plan, so please only use test data. (Need test data? Go ahead and use this list of coffee shop locations.)

When you upgrade to a paid Enterprise plan, you'll be able to keep using the same API key and API endpoints, just with higher throughput.

Yes, you can de-identify addresses so they are no longer PHI—but not the full address. According to HHS, here is how one can de-identify patient addresses:

(B) All geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, ZIP code, and their equivalent geocodes [are considered PHI], except for the initial three digits of the ZIP code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: (1) The geographic unit formed by combining all ZIP codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people; and (2) The initial three digits of a ZIP code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people is changed to 000

Yes! We have a 5% non-profit/academic discount. Please reach out to us from your official email address to have it added to your account.